Reports From The First World War: Nowadays, Tales of War and Unhappy Far-Off Things

Written by Lord Dunsany

Narrated by Charles Featherstone

Includes the collections Nowadays, Tales of War, & Unhappy Far-Off Things 

The great fantasy writer Lord Dunsany wrote very little in the way of fantasy after the onset of the First World War. This was partly because he was busy, having volunteered in 1915 and becoming a Captain in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers in Derry. However, the reality of the world bore in on our hero at this time, and it is not difficult to imagine that his heart moved to more serious concerns.

Dunsany’s days of high fantasy, it seems, ended with the emergence of civil unrest in his nation. This is why the non-fiction section is included at the end of this collection; while he wrote the odd fantasy work in later years, they were written by a distinctly different man, with a very different life. 

For a week, he lay in a hospital bed, listening to the sounds of the riots as the British forces became increasingly violent and shelled the centre of Dublin with artillery. His military belt was left in the hospital, and eventually buried with the Nationalist leader Michael Collins.

This, it seems, was the trigger for his change of heart, as expressed in ‘Nowadays’, towards poetry as the essence of writing. “In January 1917, under the stimulant of shellfire, I turned to poetry and wrote two poems in Plug-Street Wood”.

After initially being refused forward positioning, he eventually served in the trenches. In this time, his literary output was focused on writing propaganda material for the War Office, some of which is collected in the non-fiction section of this volume.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brimir & Blainn
• Release date: Oct 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9798868664816

Lord Dunsany

Lord Dunsany (1878-1957) was a British writer. Born in London, Dunsany—whose name was Edward Plunkett—was raised in a prominent Anglo-Irish family alongside a younger brother. When his father died in 1899, he received the title of Lord Dunsany and moved to Dunsany Castle in 1901. He met Lady Beatrice Child Villiers two years later, and they married in 1904. They were central figures in the social spheres of Dublin and London, donating generously to the Abbey Theatre while forging friendships with W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and George William Russell. In 1905, he published The Gods of Pegāna, a collection of fantasy stories, launching his career as a leading figure in the Irish Literary Revival. Subsequent collections, such as A Dreamer’s Tales (1910) and The Book of Wonder (1912), would influence generations of writers, including J. R. R. Tolkein, Ursula K. Le Guin, and H. P. Lovecraft. In addition to his pioneering work in the fantasy and science fiction genres, Dunsany was a successful dramatist and poet. His works have been staged and adapted for theatre, radio, television, and cinema, and he was unsuccessfully nominated for the 1950 Nobel Prize in Literature.